Inspection systems for the analysis of moving web materials have proven critical to modern manufacturing operations. Industries as varied as metal fabrication, paper, non-wovens, and films rely on these inspection systems for both product certification and online process monitoring. One major difficulty in the industry is related to the extremely high data processing rates required to keep up with current manufacturing processes. With webs of commercially viable width and web speeds that are typically used and pixel resolution that is typically needed, data acquisition speeds of tens or even hundreds of megabytes per second are required of the inspection systems. It is a continual challenge to process images and perform accurate defect detection at these data rates.
In addition, web process manufacturing operations are becoming more complicated with multiple unit operations being performed on a single roll of material during its production. For example, certain complex web-based products, such as flexible circuits, may require as many as fifteen distinct manufacturing operations over the course of days or even weeks, often utilizing multiple production lines at different physical sites. In these circumstances, it is typical to collect the web into a roll after each process and ship the roll to a different location where it is then unrolled, processed, and again collected into a roll. Each process may introduce new anomalies into a web which may or may not cause the web to be defective. Moreover, subsequent processes may make detection of earlier anomalies difficult, if not impossible.